Administration: 4.2 million people signed up for Obamacare plans through February

This time, there was no enrollment breakthrough for Obamacare — and the Obama administration needs a breakthrough.

The new enrollment numbers released Tuesday weren’t a disaster — they showed that the sign-ups continue to climb. About 940,000 people selected Obamacare private insurance plans in February, bringing to the total to 4.2 million people since the enrollment season opened in October.

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Yet the pace of new sign-ups wasn’t appreciably stronger than in January, when 1.1 million people selected health plans. That appears to be largely because there were fewer days in February than there were in the previous month’s report, but it’s an explanation that doesn’t help support messaging about major momentum.

Administration officials hope they’ll turn that around as they intensify outreach efforts through the March 31 enrollment deadline. The latest update shows that sign-ups will have to go a lot faster this month for the administration to reach even its lowered target.

The administration is aiming to enroll about 6 million people by the end of March — a goal that was revised down from 7 million after the disastrous start to HealthCare.gov five months ago. It will need to double the February sign-up rate to hit that mark.

“They are yet again going to fall short of their goals. They are not going to get to 6 million,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum, a critic of the law.

Like previous enrollment reports, Tuesday’s report didn’t say how many of the new customers have actually paid for their coverage — which they need to do to be fully enrolled — or how many were previously uninsured.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if there was a big, last-minute enrollment increase. Independent analysts have been predicting that for months, especially since young adults were always expected to be the main procrastinators.

But there’s now added pressure on the Obama administration to make sure it actually happens. Jon Kingsdale, a consultant who ran the Massachusetts health insurance exchange that pre-dated Obamacare, said he would be “happily surprised” if enrollment reaches the 6 million goal by March 31.

The new report showed basically no change since January in the age mix of the people signing up. About a quarter of the sign-ups over the first five months of enrollment were individuals ages 18 through 35, a key demographic sought by insurers to help offset the cost of covering older, typically sicker enrollees.

That figure came before President Barack Obama’s most highly publicized pitch to young adults — his interview with Zach Galifianakis on the comedy website Funny or Die, which the White House credited with driving traffic to the HealthCare.gov enrollment site on Tuesday.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the administration is expecting an enrollment surge in March, and she pointed to similar upticks in enrollment when the Medicare drug benefit launched and when Massachusetts embarked on its similar health reform effort.

“We know that millions of Americans are obtaining the security of affordable health coverage,” she said on a conference call.

Republicans aren’t buying it.

“It seems the president’s push to enroll young adults is far too little, too late,” said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner. “The administration won’t tell us how many people have actually paid for a plan or how many were previously uninsured. But what we do know is that young adults — those who the White House repeatedly said are critical — are deciding the health care law is a bad deal.”

Tuesday’s report didn’t represent the kind of turning point that last month’s enrollment report signaled, when it became clear that, at the very least, Obamacare enrollment was now stable enough that there wouldn’t be any big financial disasters for health insurance companies.

But other analysts said it’s not necessarily bad news that the new report didn’t show any major change in the enrollment trends.

MIT’s Jonathan Gruber said there was “nothing really new here” and that the final enrollment could end up in the mid-5 million range, “which isn’t bad.”

And the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Larry Levitt said that from a policy standpoint, “for the long-term success of the program, I don’t think it matters whether it’s 5 million or 6 million people in the first year.”

But because everyone will compare the final enrollment numbers with the administration’s original goals, “no doubt people will be watching that number,” Levitt said.

An additional 4.4 million people were determined to be eligible for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program through state and federal marketplaces. That total doesn’t include those who signed up through state Medicaid agencies.

The report revealed other details of the latest enrollment trends. More than 4 in 5 people signing up qualified for subsidies through tax credits. Women continued to enroll at a disproportionately higher rate than men — a 55-45 percent split. And nearly two-thirds of all sign-ups selected midlevel “silver”-level plans that cover about 70 percent of an enrollee’s costs.

It’s still unclear how many people have paid their premiums since October. Officials with four major insurers — Aetna, WellPoint, Health Care Services Corp. and Blue Shield of California — told POLITICO this week that between 80 to 85 percent had paid through February.

States are also seeing vastly different levels of enthusiasm for enrollment.

California has enrolled nearly twice as many people in its exchange as the next closest state, crossing 868,000 in February. Florida enrolled about 442,000 people during the first five months of the enrollment period.

Senior administration officials insisted Tuesday that they have “no plans” to extend enrollment, despite speculation and calls by some Democratic lawmakers and states to give people more time. In fact, Mike Hash, director of HHS’s Office of Health Reform, said Obamacare explicitly blocks the administration from adjusting the deadline.

Although enrollment in red states soared in January — more than doubling in Mississippi and climbing nearly 90 percent in Florida and Louisiana — sign-ups there were slower in February. Still, those states rank among the ones with the fastest-growing enrollment in February.

Massachusetts, which is recovering from a botched rollout of its exchange that had to be upgraded to meet the new federal requirements, saw its enrollment climb nearly 60 percent. In Nevada, which slashed its enrollment estimates after a massive technical failure in January virtually halted enrollments that month, sign-ups increased by about 25 percent in February.